4 September 2008

Transact - Dilemmas

| Tempestas
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Whilst RiotACT seems alive and kicking. It looks like a power failure and a mother of all stuff-ups has brought slabs of Velocity and other Transact ISP’s and services in the Dickson data centre down.

Can someone build a gas fired power-station to keep these things running 😉

[ED – Our monitoring was certainly throwing up a lot of websites down earlier in the morning]

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What is frustrating in today’s scenario is that our ISP knew what the problem was (TransACT lost power) at 6am, but even as late as noon when the problem was fixed, TransACT were saying “There is no problem”.
Then, once everything’s working, TransACT turn around and say “Yes, we had an outage”.
So they portray the ISPs as liars, for telling people the truth, until they fix their own mistakes and then finally admit the problem.
And is it any surprise the customers feel dicked about by getting opposite stories depending who they ring?
This morning’s problem was made even worse because TransACT f*cked up my ISP’s phone system as well, meaning many people who rang us this morning got a recording saying our number had been disconnected. We had panicking customers on our doorstep all morning thinking their ISP had gone belly-up.

tylersmayhem4:06 pm 04 Sep 08

and they are paying telstra for the service. Telstra still wins…

I do feel better about not having to hand the money directly to Tel$tra though! Not to mention iiNet’s solutions are miles better value, and service much better!

As far as I am concerned, I am not a Tel$tra customer. And I sleep better at night because of it! 😉

The reliability on Transact network via Grapevine ISP was crap. Its been much better with the Transact and Velocity combo.

tylersmayhem said :

Yes, peterh, and I also delight in the fact they have to come over to my house to connect a service that I am choosing instead of theirs 😉

and they are paying telstra for the service. Telstra still wins…

roccon said :

a handful of failures from transact since its inception is pretty good. Those who had ADSL connected from the early days with Telstra will understand the true meaning of “dog’s breakfast”

Transact has its issues, mainly to do with management, ie. expensive plans (not the ISPs), always forcing you into a new contract when making changes to your services, slow to adapt to market changes, but reliability has been great.

Reliability has been great? Great? It has been sub par at best.

TransACT are switching back to mains power at 2.30pm
If your world goes black again, you’ll know why.

transact is down more than it is running properly…
our phone line and tv are always having problems

roccon said :

a handful of failures from transact since its inception is pretty good. Those who had ADSL connected from the early days with Telstra will understand the true meaning of “dog’s breakfast”

Transact has its issues, mainly to do with management, ie. expensive plans (not the ISPs), always forcing you into a new contract when making changes to your services, slow to adapt to market changes, but reliability has been great.

thanks for the clarification, roccon. I am certain i heard this earlier today…

a handful of failures from transact since its inception is pretty good. Those who had ADSL connected from the early days with Telstra will understand the true meaning of “dog’s breakfast”

Transact has its issues, mainly to do with management, ie. expensive plans (not the ISPs), always forcing you into a new contract when making changes to your services, slow to adapt to market changes, but reliability has been great.

Reprobate said :

TransACT’s website is saying nothing about the outage… mind you it also doesn’t show the new pricing or channels available. Still shows the old plans and says a change is coming on 4 September, call TransACT for details – considering I didn’t get a letter advising the changes and only read about it in letters to the Ed in the CT, maybe their website will be updated before the end of the year…

Strike that, new details on the site as of 12.30pm…

Sounds like the definition of a dog’s breakfast. This morning I checked my TransACT TV box, about 5 of the new included channels just came up blank. And as well as channels being renumbered, the display no longer shows the channel name, only the channel number. TransACT’s website is saying nothing about the outage… mind you it also doesn’t show the new pricing or channels available. Still shows the old plans and says a change is coming on 4 September, call TransACT for details – considering I didn’t get a letter advising the changes and only read about it in letters to the Ed in the CT, maybe their website will be updated before the end of the year…

Oh and big ups to Harry at Velocity, he really does care about his job and customers 110%.

tylersmayhem12:30 pm 04 Sep 08

Yes, peterh, and I also delight in the fact they have to come over to my house to connect a service that I am choosing instead of theirs 😉

tylersmayhem said :

Just go iiNet and avoid all of the d**khead telcos in my opinion!

LOL!

I have a mate who does some work on behalf of iinet. He delights in telling the EU that he is from telstra. does the same thing for soul…

grundy said :

peterh said :

wonder what the impact is to longreach? if it is a line of sight network connect, how will it be rebooted for the clients not at home, i wonder?

The ISP’s infrastructure is fine, it’s just the TransACT part that is broken.
So there should be no change with Longreach.

‘Harry’ from Velocity provided more details about the outage at Whirlpool.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1045617

I saw that. Harry is probably one of the best operators around. I don’t have Transact, or velocity, but he reinforces the whole best customer service provision by being available to tell everyone what has caused the problem.

and considering that he started the thread, it really shows that he cares about his and other Transact clients.

tylersmayhem12:02 pm 04 Sep 08

Just go iiNet and avoid all of the d**khead telcos in my opinion!

peterh said :

wonder what the impact is to longreach? if it is a line of sight network connect, how will it be rebooted for the clients not at home, i wonder?

The ISP’s infrastructure is fine, it’s just the TransACT part that is broken.
So there should be no change with Longreach.

‘Harry’ from Velocity provided more details about the outage at Whirlpool.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1045617

wonder what the impact is to longreach? if it is a line of sight network connect, how will it be rebooted for the clients not at home, i wonder?

Of course if we were to get a data-centre with a dedictated power supply….

Can we all ask our ISP’s to disconnect the Macarthur NIMBY’s as a way to load balance?

TransACT supposedly lost power in the early hours (they’re owned by ACTEW, so you’d think they’d be better at looking after power issues) and so this morning, they’ve spent most of the morning fixing it.
ISPs have been slowly coming back online one by one. Luckily, ours was one of the last one they turned on.

Loquaciousness said :

This seems to be happening rather a lot recently. Does anyone know the cause? Is it hardware? Software? Error between the keyboard and the chair?

L

don’t know. Aurelius may be able to shed some light.

stonedwookie11:11 am 04 Sep 08

this happend so they could bring there new tv plans in they had to crash all the box’s
so they would reload with the new channels beacuse if you dont turn them off you still had access to your older channels 4 free.

Loquaciousness11:02 am 04 Sep 08

This seems to be happening rather a lot recently. Does anyone know the cause? Is it hardware? Software? Error between the keyboard and the chair?

L

Probably cause I signed up for TransACT :-p

TransACT are rubbish, always have been. Hopefully it isn’t a case of ‘always will be’.

I was down this morning, but back up now (so’s my Internet connection).

This seems to be a reasonably regular problem, and when you call Iinet (was Webone) in WA, they talk about “Canberra” having suffered an outage.

Perhaps there are some problems with the Canberra-based infrastructure? If so, they need to get it fixed, because this level of unreliability is not acceptable.

now my bigpond service looks oh, so good….

Great. I just took the reins of a website that I can’t get to.

Thanks, TransACT! Winnar!

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